Uno Prayer Meeting

If you take a group of kids and have them play Uno (a card game) you can have a good prayer meeting. Simply ask each child to ask God what to play each turn. What you will have is several kids all asking God for help to win. But winning is not winning the card game. Winning is more than that.

Having spent years in the prayer room now, I know that the life of prayer is all about living. The revelation, insight, power, visions and a thousand other favors from God are about living life well, playing each turn of the cards the best you can. When we do the best we can, we win. Winning is not the one who wins, if you know what I mean.

Each of us is a person living in a long line of people - history. None of us arrived on our own. We were both created by God and cared for by other humans. Our place in time was the Lord's doing. Our place in humanity is the result of the life flow of humanity, this is our personal "fullness of time". This is the card we have been dealt to play.

Winning, which is continual fellowship with God, is making each play under His Lordship. Even if we loose the game we can win with our ongoing fellowship with God. Winning is not always winning. The people of God need a fresh understanding of this.

Some of the greatest people, greatest Christians are people who have a very very bad hand to play, and they play it well. Some of the most immature believers have a great hand and think that their external success is the result of their wonderfulness. It is not. They simply had a good hand.

Father God
I offer up to you today
My "me" centered Christianity
I ask you to upgrade my "meness"
To the wonder of the revelation of Jesus Christ
Thank you for the cards you have give me
Even these are more than I deserve
My I play well this day
In fellowship with you.

What is life all about?

I think I am going to spend my whole life figuring out and re figuring out what life is all about. I learn every day in a new way that life is about a relationship with God. But honestly that is to frightening. I want rules to live by. I am just no good at living in relationship. If I cannot keep my kids, my wife, myself happy; how am I going to keep God happy.

I know that I will never disappoint God because he already knows what I am like. To disappoint him, He would need to have some expectation that I would not meet. God already knows me so He knows all that I am not going to do and fail to do. So why am I bothered so much by the hurt I cause Him by not doing what I am not doing. I am not saving the world, healing all the sick, transforming central IL - so I am a __________.

How does God love those of us who labor so hard to be loved. How does He love those who don't care if you love them of not. How does He love any of us? Wonderfully, simply wonderfully. But that destroys my ability to earn the love of God. If you can't earn love, what good is it.

So here is my list of how I will significantly love God today. This is what I am going to do today to be loved.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Fear

How often would we be more if we only let ourselves?

One of the most difficult things to conquer is our own knowledge of ourselves. We each know all to well our faults, failures and mistakes. Even when things are going well, we tend to look for troubles. Usually our first response to most of the things we do is ask, "how did I do"? If people do not comment on what we did/do we usually comment ourselves and out right ask them.

Now here is a strange thing. God, who is perfect and powerful is the one most responsive to our need to be loved, our need to push back the fears we have. While we, and others like us, are to busy, to important, to pressured to waits out time helping others with their fears, God seems more than willing to spend time with us. Even if that time is more "ME" time than quality time, God seems to understand and except it.

So in some strange way the very being that we all should "fear" the most is the very being in whom we must actually work at fearing. Of all the stuff makes us feel insignificant, broken, a failure, the very being who should make us feel the most that way - doesn't. Strange world isn't it.